Principal, Software Engineer (Machine Learning)

Position Summary

Personalization team at Walmart is dedicated to the mission of knowing our customers better and making it frictionless and faster for them to get what they want while building a trusted partnership with Walmart. We help bring a seamless experience to our customers irrespective of how and where they engage with us – while shopping online or picking groceries at stores. We thrive to provide each customer with a journey tailored to their individual needs, preferences and routines. We operate at the intersection of huge Walmart assortment, millions of customers, thousands of stores and Walmart associates - a multi-layer multi-objective problem space which has a unique impact on Global customer base and powers assisted AI for our associates. The Personalization team consists of big data geeks, application engineers, scientists and product visionaries all working together to design, prototype and build technology-driven products and experiences that will change the future landscape of e-commerce. We are focused on building an intelligent system that will enable 1:1 personalized customer experience, from finding the product to delivering it to the customer. We are building state-of-the-art probabilistic models and engineering marvels to serve our customer needs by leveraging cutting edge machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, natural language processing, entity-relationship extraction and knowledge representation. This will span many markets, business models and form factors; therefore, we are looking for scientists and engineers who will bring not only an abundance of experiences in technologies, but an abundant curiosity to innovate.

About Team: Our team works closely with our US stores and eCommerce business to better serve customers by empowering team members, stores, and merchants with technological innovation. From groceries and entertainment to sporting goods and crafts, Walmart U.S. offers an extensive selection that our customers value, whether they shop online at Walmart.com, through one of our mobile apps, or in-store. Focus areas include customers, stores and employees, in-store service, merchant tools, merchant data science, and search and personalization.

What you'll do:

• Design, build, and deploy large-scale, production-grade ML systems, including deep learning models, real-time inference services, and end-to-end ML pipelines for our generative shopping agents.
• Lead the development of Multi-Channel Personalized (MCP) agents and tools. This includes implementing advanced techniques like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide agents with a comprehensive understanding of long-term customer history, preferences, and intent, as well as short-term session context.
• Champion the use of multimodal data (text, images, user behavior, contextual signals) to power hyper-personalized recommendations, product discovery, and proactive customer engagement.
• Implement and maintain robust and observable systems for model training, deployment, and monitoring at scale. Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to evolve our ML stack, leveraging cloud-native services.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product managers, data scientists, and software engineers, to translate business goals into robust technical solutions. Serve as a technical leader and mentor for junior team members, setting standards for best practices and system design.
• Continuously evaluate new technologies and research in generative AI, personalization, and contextual understanding to inform and advance our product roadmap.

What you'll bring:

• Proven expertise in building and deploying production-grade ML solutions at scale, preferably in e-commerce, or recommendation systems.
• Hands-on experience with generative AI, including LLMs, RAG systems, and agent frameworks.
• Experience with multimodal data and building systems that integrate diverse data types (user behavior, product data, images, text, etc.).
• Proficiency in Python and relevant ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Deep understanding of ML engineering principles, including data pipelines, model training, and serving infrastructure.
• Experience with cloud-native development (e.g., GCP, Azure), containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes) and microservices architecture.
• Familiarity with vector databases, knowledge graphs, and semantic search techniques for efficient memory management and context retrieval.

About Walmart Global Tech

Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people. That’s what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We’re a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity expert's and service professionals within the world’s leading retailer who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. We have roles for those chasing their first opportunity as well as those looking for the opportunity that will define their career.

Benefits: Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Walmart, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer – By Choice. We believe we are best equipped to help our associates, customers, and the communities we serve live better when we really know them. That means understanding, respecting, and valuing unique styles, experiences, identities, ideas, and opinions – while being inclusive of all people.

Primary Location: 1345 Crossman Ave, Sunnyvale, CA , United States of America